BSG was by no means hard science fiction.

Yes, the writers avoided some soft science cliches like bumpy forehead aliens, space anomalies and time warps and stuff. There's still plenty of soft science to go around. What's even more damning, they were inconsistent with their own soft science in the show.

To put it another way, it would be like someone saying "I didn't like the simplistic morality of Lord of the Rings with dark lords and fairy tale thinking" so he comes up with a low fantasy conflict between human kingdoms with a smattering of dragons and magic but then goes and brings in an Arthurian predestined king that fits squarely with traditional high fantasy. I thought that's the sort of stuff you wanted to avoid to make it feel like a grounded fantasy.

Looks very promising. Interested to see what comes of it.

Short question: How will you keep this show from ending in suck?

Longer version of question: see here. The Lifespan of a TV Show.

Good stories have a beginning, middle, and end. Wasted stories start out good but then get stretched out to the point that the writer simply loses interest and is phoning it in. Television suffers from this disproportionately because network execs are selling viewer eyeballs to advertisers and don't really give a damn what goes between the commercial breaks. They'll keep a show going until it's no longer profitable and cancel it. Hence you get what's depicted in the Cracked post above. I can think of a lot of shows that started out strong, ended terribly, and don't hold up for a rewatch.

Do you have a plan? Something better than the Cylons because they said they had a plan and most certainly didn't.

Well, DUH.

AV kits can only protect against attacks that are known. They may be able to detect new variants of attacks, so once a certain botnet type is known they may well be able to find zero-day developments if their heuristics are good (not a trivial task, but some have mighty good detection rates against unknown variants), but how are they supposed to detect what is simply not known to be a threat?

And likewise they cannot protect against attacks that target YOUR and only YOUR company. Where'd they get samples of it in the first place?

Not wanting to break NDAs but: You overestimate the intelligence in intelligence...

Is that the same bunch of dorks that came up with "no child left behind"?

If so, I wouldn't really use them to prove a point...

'An army marches on its stomach.'

'C'est la soupe qui fait le soldat.'

Nothing, absolutely nothing, matters more at winning wars than logistics. The lethal fighting force is but the edge of a vast engineering and distribution network. Or, if it is not the edge of such a network, it is soon a defeated lethal fighting force.

An example, ok.

One standard question I use a lot when filling programmer positions for our bug hunting crew is to take a few common entries from our bug report list and ask them "where'd you look for the bug". That usually already gives me a pretty good idea what kind of "thinking" I have in front of me. What I do NOT want to hear is some kind of apology (like "I don't know the code, so I can't say anything specific..."), I know he doesn't know, and that's sadly often exactly the problem he will face, but I still want an answer. You get tossed into this bug, how do you handle it?

Here I like to hear that he is checking the headers so he gets an idea what libraries are used, checks if the libraries are outdated, checks the lib known bugs... or whatever else he'd do, hell, nearly anything is fine. I want to know if he has some kind of general approach to bug hunting. What I don't like to hear is useless ass-covering tactics, some kind of apology or trying to find someone to blame, like finding out who wrote the code 3 years ago. Even if he finds him, that guy certainly won't remember a thing about it.

It's worse when I hire someone for my department directly, we get to face very unique situations daily. Security can be tricky at times, because your problems are not only technology but also very personally, both with personnel security issues as well as secrecy. What I want to see in general in an applicant is whether he has a plan. Whether he can come up with an idea that will solve the problem or at least find the source of it, whether he has "common sense" and whether he knows how people work. That's something that is oddly not taught at any kind of university: People are generally lazy and will gladly cut corners. For some odd reason, everyone with zero "real life" experience will assume that people work according to spec. Hint: They don't.

If I had any say, I'd flip education and military budget around, but then we'd have to deal with a soaring unemployment rate, 'cause soldiers can't easily be turned into teachers...

All the points you field are valid and also part of the problem. I also don't see the teacher as some sort of government mandated babysitter so parents can get rid of their brats for at least 6-10 hours a day before they park them in front of the idiot box. A teacher is exactly that. A teacher. His job is to present the curriculum (which by itself needs some heavy overhaul, but let's not get into detail), in a way that the student can understand. It's not his job to make the student pass, it's his job to teach and to test. Period! If a child is disruptive the child may just as well leave the class as far as I am concerned. Actually, I would highly prefer it. If they fail due to them not WANTING to learn it is NOT the teacher's fault.

That doesn't change, though, that the tests themselves are far, far away from reality's requirements. In reality, nobody presents you with some kind of "test task" akin to "solve this equation" or "a triangle is this long and that wide, how long is its circumference". Nobody gives a shit about that. Reality pits you into tasks like "you have a bottle this big, can you fill the contents of a can this big into it or will it spill?"

Such tests needn't be more "taxing" for the teacher, neither for coming up with them nor for grading them. I remember some of my math tests that were quite taxing and tested a good deal of my abilities with less than half a page of specifications and my answers filling roughly the same amount of space. Still took most students the better part of two hours to think it through and figure it out (if they managed at all, but that's a different matter).

How much influence a teacher actually has on the tests, their form and content, of course depends on what he teaches and at what level. I do agree that elementary and high school teachers are very limited in their ability to change tests, with the standardization craze and the "teaching to the test" bullshit that swept the nation. That's what you get if you tie the funding of schools to their "objective" grades. What's the sensible thing to do for a principal? Of course to make sure his students pass the tests with great scores, and that's of course accomplished easiest when you do whatever you can to make them "test-compatible", anything short of outright cribbing is fair game.

But no later than university level, there should be quite a bit of room for testing towards reality.

Bullseye! Can someone hand that guy an insightful mod?

That's exactly what's wrong with our schools (and to a lesser degree even universities). It's simply easier for teachers and educators to come up with cram tests, preferably multiple-choice so they can far easier check the right answers, than to think up some kind of realistic problem and then evaluate the students' solutions, which will invariably differ slightly from one to the next due to them having different, but probably equally valid, approaches. Hell, it might even expose that the teacher knows less of a subject than his student (which isn't as far fetched as it may seem, especially in a field like CS where new developments often render your knowledge obsolete in few years).

It's simple laziness on the side of the teacher, and so we're stuck with tests that favor those who are able to hoover up information like a sponge, pour it out in the test and instantly forget it. I know a few people of that quality. They were doing quite well in school, but out in the reality, they're usually quite useless.

I think you got the GP wrong.

His point is, if I understand him correctly, and I do agree in this point with him, that it becomes more and more obsolete to have a mass of facts in your brains without the ability to apply them. It gets easier and faster every day to look things like that up. What's heaps harder and rarer is the ability to solve problems.

My profs at the university, and I still thank them for that, preferred the latter. I'd have a hard time thinking of any (but pure basic) tests that weren't open book, "bring whatever materials you want" tests. In general, anything but interactive material (read: sending the test to someone else and have him come up with the answers) was pretty much ok. You were actually expected to use your notes and books, because they didn't test what you could stuff into your head, they were much more interested in you showing that you understood what they taught and that you could demonstrate that you can apply it to "real life" problems. The test question were not "solve this equation" but rather "you're facing this problem", with the test being more to come up with a solution rather than actually solving it.

I distinctly remember a math test that I thought I bombed only to find out my prof gave me an B, despite not having finished a single sample. His argument was that I demonstrated I know what approach was necessary, that I showed I did understand how to use the rules required and he expected that I can punch buttons on a calculator when I dare to study CS and am about to graduate, if I couldn't, I probably wouldn't have survived the entry level programming classes.

And that's basically what counts. Today I am often tasked to screen applicants and I throw similar things at them, only to be surprised how many cannot come up with a solution. And interestingly enough, the ones that usually ace my "real life problems" are the ones without a "relevant" degree.